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Chapter 8
Prev Chapter PART EIGHT Guen was joined only by the hum of flickering floodlights and the echo of her own footsteps as she made her way through the cement halls of the bunker. The assassin shivered – it was cold down here, she thought to herself, though she knew deep down that the temperature had little to do with her shaking. Another turn in the labyrinthine bunker and she stopped, facing a tall, rusted metal door. She gripped the handle and, with a deep breath, sent the great thing creaking open. The room reminded Guen of an old, dilapidated prison cell. It was bare and dimly lit, its blank gray walls illuminated only by the glow of a few computer monitors. Sitting in a chair was Gigabane. His trademark silver mask was thinly outlined by the reflection of the screens behind him, taking on an appearance quite like an eclipsed moon. Beside him was a bearded older man with long white hair and a weathered face, faintly resembling some portrait Guen had seen as a child, though she was unable to place it. They had been speaking in what might have been some dialect of French, but stopped as they sighted the new arrival. “Ah, comrade Guen,” came Gigabane’s voice from beneath his helmet. “You’re punctual as ever. How’ve you been these past two weeks? I’ve heard nothing since I, ah…” “Tried to kill me?” she answered abruptly, adding “sir” as an afterthought. The mask’s plexiglass eyes remained fixed upon the assassin. “Warning shots, I assure you, dear,” he softly replied. “Well, alright, I might have lost my cool a bit when you told me you lost the payload. But I’ve talked it over with some comrades and, well, bringing it back wasn’t really as important as finding out for sure that it was useful to us – and your interrogation of that scientist worked like a charm in that regard. With flying colors, even.” Guenhwyvar’s gaze shifted briefly to the older comrade. He had turned around and was now watching what seemed to be a news feed with great interest. “Sir, I have to ask… is what’s been going on in Tuzosia in the past forty-two hours related to the Animadversionite?” Guen said in a whispering tone. “That is the question, isn’t it?” Gigabane replied, drumming his fingers against one another. “What’s going on in Tuzosia? We’ve been arranging to revisit that site at Hiskor ever since you made your report, and just as we were ready to close in our goals what should happen? Bombings, earthquakes, mass hallucinations… the works. Locals say that it’s the devil, rising up from hell.” Guen could feel the hairs on the back of her neck prickling, and had to suppress another shudder. What had the ninjas said about ‘evil powers buried beneath crust of this world’…? “Preposterous,” she quickly replied in what she hoped was a calm voice. “This is simply a large-scale terrorist attack, I’m sure…” “Yes, I know that,” the masked spy replied. “We’ve noticed that the unnatural seismic activity has a focal point… Hiskor.” He stood and gestured to the streaming reports blinking in and out on all the displays. “It’s a classic technique, not unfamiliar to the Americans… what I like to call the ‘Scooby Doo maneuver’. First you get everyone to panic, with your monsters and your attacks; then, once everyone’s been cleared off the land, Old Man Weatherby makes a beeline for the oil under the amusement park.” “However!” he suddenly cried. “We of the WPN Spy Network cannot be routed by such base American trickery. They’ll be relying on the inattention of the local government in their retrieval of the Animadversionite… but we, we will march at once into the heart of Tuzosia and steal it from right under their noses! And you, Guen, shall accompany me at the head of this assault!” He clapped a gloved hand upon his subordinate’s shoulder. Guen’s skin grew paler. “I… me? But comrade Bane, you cannot be serious!” she cried. “I am an assassin, I work in stealth, not… war-zones!” Gigabane pulled away and shrugged. “I merely felt that we would do well to employ every great shot on our payroll in a dangerous, large-scale assault such as this… but if you insist, I can simply tell the Captain of your refusal when I land in Tuzosia…” There was a long silence. “The Captain will be present for the operation, then?” Guen asked meekly. “Indeed,” Gigabane replied, his voice still betraying none of the malice in his words. “I have to say, Guen… failure is one thing, but treachery… I’m not sure you’d be so lucky this time...” The assassin turned her eyes downwards as though reviewing her options, then straightened her posture and saluted smartly. “There will be… no need to report this, comrade. I shall be there. I shall fight again for this new weapon. And this time… I shall not fail.” Gigabane fell back into his seat, apparently satisfied. Behind him, one of the monitors showed a desert landscape rocked with explosions… --- The Regulator raised his hand to shield his eyes from the cascading dust kicked up by the last assault. Somewhere in the distance a detachment of troops was sent flying through the air by the impact, screaming if they weren’t already dead. “Damnit,” the super-cop yelled, “what kind of weaponry are these things using?” He had heard the tales of the opposition which faced the previous small detachments sent to beat the WPN network to the Animadversionite, but he thought for sure that at least some of it had been hyperbole. Yet now, the elite forces he had acquired for this mission were being torn through by no more than four, admittedly unorthodox, opponents. One was masked in a suit of burning red armor; another seemed to be a devilish suit of samurai armor, mutated and alive, which drifted eerily through the air; one wore an icy white armor similar to the first’s, but seemed to be hanging back and cradling a strange kind of shining green egg; and the last, and perhaps strangest, appeared to be an enormous humanoid goat, which tore through body armor and flesh with enormous crushing claws. Bullets and missiles barely seemed to deter these fiends. Only Jack Acid, who was attempting to wrestle the bizarre goat-man to the ground, seemed to be having any luck at all. Meanwhile the red-armored creature hurled fireballs into the sand, tossing soldiers from where they stood, as the floating armor swept to cut the wounded men down with a long black katana. Whatever these things were, conventional weaponry was useless against them. It was time to fight with some unorthodox tactics of their own. “Lieutenant!” he barked into his radio, adjusting it quickly to the frequency of the hovercraft parked nearby. “Unleash the robot!” “Copy that,” the radio sounded back, and a few moments later a hatch opened as though from out of nowhere in the whirling sands behind the Regulator. A mechanical behemoth emerged, supported by six spindly metal legs. Its silver body was covered in cannons and flailing electrified tentacles. A panel on its front side glowed red, and it broke into a charge. Soldiers and demons alike stepped a few paces back from the rampaging automaton, which gave a creaky groan as its artificial eyes fixed onto its targets. A thick blast of energy hit the floating devil square in its chest, sending its body whirling unceremoniously towards the sand below. Jack only barely ducked out of the way as a tentacle, entangled in leaping forks of electricity, lashed against the goat-man’s chest, causing it to scream in pain as the appendage seared through fur and flesh. The two remaining assailants seemed to flee as their companions struggled to rise to their feet, the enormous machine standing triumphantly above them. The Regulator allowed himself a satisfied grin. All the money they threw at those kids in engineering to build this ridiculous thing paid off after all… As the soldiers cheered, the Ice and Fire Sentinels halted their retreat. “At last, we’ve found a perfect host,” said the burning-armored thrall of the dark god. “Let us revive the Overlord at last!” His freezing counterpart nodded, and the two rushed back towards the site of the battle. The walking robot tank shuffled its legs through the sand, clumsily turning to face his returning opponents. Before the machine had time to attack, the Ice Sentinel tossed the object he had been carrying into the robot’s face. At first it seemed like a gamble meant to blind the machine, but the Sentinel’s attack quickly proved far more meaningful. The oval shape of the green object disappeared as it melted into a gooey film, stretching across the surface upon which it had been planted with alarming speed. The robot fought to free itself from the spreading slime with its tentacles, but soon these too were ensconced in the devil-ichor. It seeped into the robot’s crevices in some places while hardening into thick shells in others. Soon what had been an earthly weapon was something else entirely. What turned to face the Regulator’s troops was somewhere between machine and monster, a silver-green leviathan with glowing crimson eyes – and to their utter horror, it was laughing. “Jesus!” DR screamed. “Fall back, men! They’ve hijacked it… FALL BACK, ALL OF YOU!” The troops were already scrambling to escape, but a few were unable to escape the lengthening tendrils of the beast, which now burst with scorching flames and freezing clouds as well as bolts of electricity. “Yes… flee, you insects!” came a booming voice from within the robot’s corrupted innards. “Flee for your pitiful lives! Or stay, and I shall purge you here and now!” He crushed a man’s frozen midsection into splinters of ice illustratively. “Use what remains of your meaningless existence to tell the world that Gir, Overlord of the Sentinels, scours this world once more!” The Regulator reached for his radio again. “Lieutenant, they’ve hijacked the secret weapon! We need Trebek right now or our bid for Hiskor is as good as failed. Where is Trebek?!” “He… I don’t know, sir!” the Lieutenant’s voice cried back. “The last I saw he was pissing on camel spiders, but he must have wandered off, or…” A bolt of ice brushed against the Regulator’s shoulder. “God DAMNIT!” he cried, wheeling back to fire a bullet into the Ice Sentinel’s mask, sending him staggering backwards a few steps. Only one option remained… he had to call in the reserves. “Okay, I’m heading back to the craft with what’s left of the men! Be ready to patch me through to the Engineering Bay back at the research center… I want to speak with Agent 100 immediately!” --- The Engineering Bay was silent, but for the faint sound of J-Pop originating from the computer of Agent 100 – alias Jonathan Xu. Most of the government troops usually stationed at the base had been mobilized and shipped off to Tuzosia. Jonathan was taking advantage of this relative emptiness by kicking back, assembling a tiny motor, and indulging in his less-than-secret passion for Japanese animation. The latest episode of “Pretty Tomato God-Force J” was abruptly interrupted by a grainy video transmission from the interior of a hovercraft. The Regulator’s grimacing, panicked face filled much of the screen. Sparks and steam seemed to be escaping unchecked from the machinery in the background. Startled, Jon dropped the gadget he had been tinkering with. “Agent 100!” he shouted. “This is Agent DR. Do you copy?” Jon scratched his head. “Uh, copy that, Regulator. How goes Operation AD?” There was a loud boom; the transmission flickered. DR swore loudly for the hundredth time that day. “What does it look like, Einstein? Our advances have been totally repelled… I’ve only rescued a handful, the rest are either dead or scattered, even Acid and Trebek. Those things commandeered that robot you lent us, too…” “What? No!” Jon groaned. “Not ol’ Johnald… Syd and I put a lot of work into him!” He paused, thinking back to the machine’s construction. “How’d they do it, anyways? We had some pretty advanced anti-hacking countermeasures in place, way beyond what anyone in WPN would’ve been able to deal with…” “It’s not the WPN Network!” the Regulator cried with an impatient air. “I really don’t know who… or what these things are, but they’re blocking us out from the Animadversionite and now they’re out for blood. Conventional weaponry is barely effective against them… we need you here right away, or at least your-“ Someone shouted in the background. DR turned his head and shielded his face. The transmission flickered out, and suddenly Jon was staring at paused footage of a tiny pink-haired cartoon lass, frozen in the middle of her four-minute Tomato Warrior transformation. He clicked an ‘x’, the window closed. Leaping from his chair, he strolled up to the midnight blue convertible parked nearby. “Wake up, Syd,” he announced as he rapped upon its hood with his fist. The car yawned. As Jonathan briskly made his way to the other end of the Engineering Bay, the convertible’s parts began to wildly rearrange themselves. Doors split apart to reveal arms, the hood folded forward to form a chest; knees dropped from beneath its chassis while a head shot forth from the vehicle’s insides. “Morning, bra,” grunted the fully-transformed Syd, stretching his mechanical limbs. He grabbed a nearby can of gasoline, removed its cap with his mouth, and began loudly slurping fuel. “That costs a fortune, you know,” Jon shouted absent-mindedly to the towering car-robot behind him, as he dug hurriedly through a heap of unfinished contraptions. “I really wish you’d let me hook you up with a new fuel source.” “I think the government can afford to throw a little extra funding to a guy who died in the line of duty for them,” Syd muttered, upending the gas can to get at the last few drops of fuel. “You only kind of died,” Jon replied, looking up from the pile of junk. “And it wasn’t in the line of duty, it’s because you thoughtlessly charged a chick for messing with your car.” “Yeah, and now my brain is IN that car,” Syd replied, tossing the empty can over his shoulder. “Show a little sympathy, man. What are you in such a hurry to find, anyways?” Jon grinned. “Listen, DR called me from over in Tuzosia. We’re being called into active duty.” “No shit!” Syd shouted, his face breaking into a metallic grin. “I’m finally getting out of this damn garage! So, uh, what’s our mission?” “Seemed like DR’s ship got knocked out of the sky before he had time to give us proper instructions,” Zoids answered as he finally retrieved an old remote from within the depths of the pile. “Beat the bad guys and grab the Animadversionite, I guess? I don’t know, we’ll figure it out when we get there.” He pressed a button on the remote; a large blast-door that always seemed to be kept closed began to open with a rickety clanking sound. “The awesome part,” he said with a smirk as he turned back to face Syd, “is that he never got a chance to specify what type of artillery we can and can’t use.” Syd’s artifical jaw dropped. “You don’t mean…?” he asked, gazing at the silhouetted leviathan within the secluded garage. “Yes,” Jon replied, his grin widening. “I’ll be piloting the Zoid.” --- Late in the evening, a cloaked man stepped forth from the darkened canyon passage, a knapsack slung across his back and a walking staff in hand. The gateway of the Temple of Pikhal stood before him, but it had changed in the past few days since his last visit. There were deep gashes in the masonry, cracks running through the pillars... and the wandering stranger thought he detected the scent of blood in the area. His leathery face darkened, but showed no sign of surprise. The man crossed the Temple’s threshold, nodding to a monk posted as sentry as he did so. He darted through the familiar halls of Pikhal, stopping every few paces to turn his head to take in the sights of the war-torn Temple. All he seemed to find were wounded monks laying on bunks, being treated by less wounded monks – though he did notice a large and vaguely human-shaped hole in one wall he passed. As he arrived at the courtyard, he spotted two strangers to the Temple: a pair of ninjas, perched by the fountain. The taller one was sponging a large day-old cut on her green-haired counterpart’s back. “They’ve sealed up pretty nicely,” said Rei. “You’ll be well enough to fight by tomorrow.” “Alas, I fear the wound is enchanted,” Zack moaned in faux-despair. “I must carry it for the rest of my life… oh Rei, if only you could carry me back to the Shire …” Rei, apparently less than amused by his response, flicked his wound with one hand and delivered a chop to the back of his head with the other. “Enjoy your recovery,” she growled, “because the second you’re all healed I’m going to bash your head in.” A tap on the wanderer’s shoulder caused him to turn away from the bickering warriors and face the man he had been seeking. The Prophet’s dark blue cloak hung in tatters thanks to the battle that had taken place at his temple, but he remained in good cheer as always. “Pako, old friend,” Wing said warmly. “What news from the battlefield?” “Prophet,” he answered, bowing slightly. “The Americans touched down in their flying vehicles sometime this morning… I think they’ve been trying to get at Hiskor for longer, but this would be the first time they’ve taken things seriously. They’ve been thwarted by the demons once already, though I feel some amongst their numbers will remain to fight. The spies have come to Tuzosia as well, as you have foretold. They landed in crafts like those the Americans use late this afternoon, though I have no knowledge of their operations as of now.” Wing nodded as Pako spoke. “The pawns of white and black have moved into position at last,” he muttered. “There’s more,” the wanderer continued. “While I was gathering this information, I saw… strange folk. Treasure hunters, guns for hire… warriors all, but more than even you have foreseen. Methinks the truth behind the goings-on here in Tuzosia have begun to leak among forces none of us had been expecting.” “Yes… the pull of the Animadversionite is a treacherous thing to predict,” Wing said as he rubbed his chin, apparently deep in thought. “So much of this discipline of prophecy is like the throwing of the boomerang… you might not recall the thing until it comes back to you. Thank you for your assistance, Pako. That will be all.” “Always happy to help, Prophet,” Pako replied with another bow, before scurrying off into the dark recesses of the night. Wing made his way over to the pair of ninjas, whose arguments ceased under the Prophet’s gaze. “The time has come,” he said shortly. “We shall make for the Temple at Hiskor at dawn. And we will not be alone.” Next Chapter